In the real world, while performing various activities, individuals also have awareness of other entities (people, etc.) close to them with whom they can potentially collaborate on the spot. For example, when going to a mall, one may quickly ask another person close by for the directions to the mall, or to a specific store.
In a virtual world, a program such as, for example, SecondLife, proposes to recreate the real world-like environment but in a virtual setting. In the virtual setting, individual's avatars perform different activities (for example, browsing information, walking, flying, buying, etc.) while seeing other people and/or objects close to them that they may have never come across before. As such, this opens up tremendous opportunities for on-the-spot collaboration between entities.
A challenge facing enterprises exists, however, in using collaboration as a tool for innovation. Specifically, challenges can exist, for example, in building effective communities, and creating effective collaboration between employees, customers, and partners.
Also, as appreciated by one skilled in the art, real-time interaction (for example, ST, Yahoo Messenger, Flixter, etc.) differs from asynchronous interaction (for example, electronic mail (e-mail), web-logs (blogs), wikis, jams, Orkut, etc.). For example, real-time collaboration recaptures the immediacy of face-to-face communication and more easily establishes trust and rapport among team members. Also, real-time interaction (as compared to asynchronous interaction) potentially enables heightened productivity, faster response to customers, and greater agility in capturing business opportunities.
Exemplary existing approaches also, for example, only send a uniform resource locator (URL) to the server side for computation of distance, as opposed to also incorporating the user's current activity at the user's end. Existing approaches also only talk in terms of web pages and how the uniform resource identifiers (URIs) are sent from the user's browser to their server side for computation of distance between any two users. Such approaches cannot handle the situation where the user's browser is displaying dynamic and/or personalized content which is changing based on user's actions. If a user looks at a web having asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) based pages, the main URL may not be indicative of the content in the page.
In existing approaches, if only the URL is sent to the server-side, then the server cannot create the context that the user currently has simply by a downloading the page because it is no longer a page download but maybe a mash-up of the information from different URLs, and this information may change in non-deterministic ways as the user interacts with a mash-up applications. Further, the users may also personalize the web pages or mash-ups. If the server in existing approaches wants to get the personalized web page or mash-up page, then it has to (disadvantageously) have the credentials of the user and access the page on user's behalf.
Other existing approaches look at the URLs being executed by users by performing all the distance-based calculations at the web server end. The distance or similarity being computed is for finding similarity in navigation patterns or search strategies, as opposed to looking fox similarities in activities by actually extracting the content at the client/user end (as opposed to the server end). In such existing approaches, the focus is on navigation patterns or search strategies, and consequently such approaches will miss bringing the above two people together.
Existing approaches also include mappings disadvantageously done a priori based on keywords on a web page. Other approaches include finding similarity between any two users by knowing which URLs a particular user is visiting, and comparing that sequence of URLs to other users' sequence of URLs visited to find a closeness measure between any two users. Such approaches do not consider non-web based applications, and the client side is limited to providing the URL information but not the content of the page.
None of the middleware for collaboration (like blogs, wikis, jams, etc.) in existing approaches supports same-time-type real-time presence information having the infrastructure for bringing the correct people and/or entities together. As a result, an on-the-spot collaboration-promoting web would be advantageous.